Many deaths of live-born piglets are caused by the sow crushing piglets when she changes posture. When a piglet gets trapped it starts screaming immediately. However, the responsiveness of the sows toward screams was found to be variable which could be caused by differences in the scream characteristic. We predicted (i) that screams of heavy piglets should differ from light piglets in their acoustic structure and (ii) that sows should have higher responsiveness towards screams of heavy piglets .The two lightest and two heaviest piglets were chosen in 15 litters. The piglets' screams were recorded on Day 1 after birth during a simulated crushing situation lasting 30 sec. Experimental procedures were approved by the Institutional Animal Care Committee. 1431 calls (n=59 piglets) were individually sampled and analyzed in their time and frequency domain. None of the frequency structure of the calls showed any significant differences between heavy and light piglets. However, light piglets had a shorter call duration compared to heavy piglets (GLMM, F1,17 =13.7, p < 0.002). On Day 2 a playback with screams of the lightest crushed piglet and a playback of the heaviest crushed piglet in the litter were presented during a lying down event to 12 sows. The sows did not differ in their reaction to the screams of the heavies and lightest piglet (GENMOD; ?2(1)= 0.33, NS). In conclusion, piglet weight did not significantly influence the vocal structure of screams during a crushing event. This suggests that all piglets vocalize at maximum during this life threatening situation and the sow's responsiveness towards crushing screams is influenced by other factors than the piglet weight.